Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1832

By Barbara Bush

Book Overview

" . . . pioneering study in an area long neglected by historians." --Women's Review of Books

" . . . we must admire this as an important and interesting contribution." --The Times of the Americas

"Bush's well-organized and clearly written book will appeal to readers interested in women's studies and comparative studies of the black diaspora. . . . readable and valuable . . . " --Choice

" . . . Bush's outstanding contribution is documenting women's unique resistance: They did everything they could not to bear children." --New Directions For Women

" . . . extremely informative and enjoyable to read, performing the valuable contribution of collecting and analysing data about a relatively neglected topic . . . " --Gender and History

"Both the general reader and the academic specialist should find this book a valuable contribution to the discourse on gender and slave relations in plantation America" --International Migration Review

This is the first book on black slave women to take into account the complexities of gender, race, and class which made their experience of slavery different from that of the black men. Bush challenges certain myths surrounding black women's lives as workers, mothers, and as activists in the vanguard of resistance to slavery.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0253212510
• ISBN13: 9780253212511
• Release Date: May 1990
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.9" x 9.1"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Paints a vivid portrait of Carribean women slave life

This book is about the role of black women in resistance to slavery in the British Carribean. The author writes that life in the British Carribean was particularly savage; planters were so busy driving their slaves to make a profit that they didn't have time to formulate any paternalist ideology as happened with slave-owners in the American South. Some of the examples of the evidence presented here is given below. She notes a large outcry by planters in Trinidad in 1823 when the whipping of female slaves was banned. The planters argued that it was the only effective device for specifically keeping female slaves in line. "One colonial office official stated that female slaves 'more frequently merited punishment than males.'"She quotes accounts from several planters about the particular insolence of domestic female slaves. Such domestics were often in a worse position than fieldhands for they were under much closer scrutiny of masters and vulnerable to the latter's sexual lecheries and subsequent raging jealousies of the master's wife. Even with benevolent masters as lovers, the slave women would manipulate and steal from them. Such manipulation and stealing by all slaves was seen as evidence of being inherent traits among Africans by people too stupid to comprehend that the slaves might be asserting their own individuality and freedom by this act. She quotes an account from testimony before the House of Commons in 1790 by one Henry Coor who reported that the owner of a Jamaican plantation where he stayed one night nailed the ear of a domestic slave to a tree post because she had broken a plate. The slave in the morning was found to have wrenched her ear out of this imprisonment and when found was severely whipped. She quotes an account from a Dr. John Williamson who related the story of a slave giving birth after having been confined in the stocks and then dying of a fever. She quotes accounts from estates owned by two London merchants, Thomas and William King. In one estate she quotes a punishment book that of the 34 slaves punished in the first six months of 1827, 21 were women. She quotes a number of accounts of individual insubordination on an estate of the Kings in what is now Guiana in South America. Even though a slave named Clarrissa had her punishment increased from 12 hours of solitary confinement to 60 hours chained in the stockade, her insubordination did not decrease, writes the author. She quotes accounts from a liberal planter named Monk Lewis who reported a scene of insubordination at his place where female slaves affected a work slowdown. When an overseer demanded that the women do their duty, one of the latter ran at the former and tried to strangle him. Lewis is quoted on reports of white overseers kicking pregnant black women in their bellies and thereby damaging the child or the mother. Slave-owners began to enact legislation for their own benefit to ameliorate the harsh treatment of black women, for with slave importation b